While the Rwandan Civil War was a complex sequence of violent episodes which included killers and victims on all sides, most historians agree with RPF's assertions that the 1994 genocide was a deliberate, methodical Hutu campaign to completely exterminate the Tutsis, and that plans for the genocide were well known in advance by European, American, and UN officials.

** Rwandan Hutu rebels kill and dismember 8 foreign tourists at the Buhoma homestead, Uganda.

* The Rwandan Genocide – between 6 April 1994 until mid-July 1994 a mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutu political moderates occurred by the Hutu dominated government under the Hutu Power ideology.

Hutu Rwandan genocidal leaders are on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in the Rwandan National Court system, and, most recently, through the informal Gacaca programme.

In this war, militarized Tutsi elements in the South Kivu area of Zaire, known as Banyamulenge to disguise their original Rwandan Tutsi heritage, allied with the Tutsi RDF forces against the Hutu refugees in the North Kivu area, which included the Interahamwe militias.

Hutu and other Rwandan children in Virunga National Park.

A Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, invaded Rwanda from Uganda, which started a civil war against Rwanda's Hutu government in 1990.

A peace agreement was signed, but violence erupted again, culminating in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, when Hutu extremists killed an estimated 800, 000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsis.

The fighting culminated in the Hutu mass killings of Tutsi and Hutu in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, in which the Hutu then in power killed an estimated 500, 000 – 1, 000, 000 people, largely of Tutsi origin.

Medicine and clothing were provided to both Hutu and Tutsi Witnesses during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Intergroup conflict can be highly competitive, especially for social groups with a long history of conflict ( for example, the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, rooted in group conflict between the ethnic Hutu and Tutsi ).

Rwandan genocide remains an atrocity that the indigenous Hutu and Tutsi peoples still believe is unforgivable.

The respite was brief, as the plane carrying Ntaryamira and Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, a fellow Hutu, was shot down by unknown assailants while landing at the Rwandan capital of Kigali killing both.

Tension between Tutsi and Hutu had been escalating through the 1950s, culminating in the 1959 Rwandan Revolution.

Following the Rwandan Genocide, Hutu refugees and many members of the former Hutu-led government fled as part of the Great Lakes refugee crisis.

In November 1996 at the start of the First Congo War, Rwandan government forces consequently attacked the Hutu camps, and forces of the then Zaire government which allowed the insurgency.

In 1998, they accompanied General Romeo Dallaire to Tanzania where he was due to testify against a Rwandan Hutu official accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide.

The biggest problems facing the government are reintegration of more than 2 million refugees returning from as long ago as 1959 ; the end of the insurgency and counter-insurgency among ex-military and Interahamwe militia and the Rwandan Patriotic Army, which is concentrated in the north and south west ; and the shift away from crisis to medium-and long-term development planning.

* a Rwandan woman seemingly moments away from being killed by Tutsi militia during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide — she stayed on the phone with As It Happens up to the point when the attackers knocked on her door.

The militia enjoyed the backing of the Hutu-led government leading up to, during, and after the Rwandan Genocide.

When it started, the Rwandan militia numbered around 30, 000, or one militia member for every ten families.

The Rwandan military and Hutu militia groups, notably the Interahamwe, systematically set out to murder all the Tutsis they could reach, regardless of age or sex, as well as the political moderates among the Hutu.

The biggest problems facing the government are reintegration of the more than two million refugees, ending the insurgency among ex-soldiers and Interahamwe militia fighters and the Rwandan Patriotic Army in the north and southwest of the country, and the shift away from crisis to medium and long-term development planning.

The Goma refugee camps, in which the Hutu had created a militia called the FDLR ( Democratic Force for the Liberation of Rwanda ), were again attacked by Rwandan government forces and the RCD.

Many of those responsible for the genocide, the former Rwandan Armed Forces ( FAR ) and interahamwe militia, used the anonymity offered by the camps to reorganize into the rebel Rassemblement pour le Retour et la Démocratie au Rwanda ( RDR ).

She was accused of having incited troops and militia to rape thousands of women during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

The most extreme example of this came from the Deputy Prime Minister, Addisu Legesse, who, in a public debate on 15 April, compared the opposition parties with the Interhamwe militia, which perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

During the First Congo War, Kabarebe was the commanding officer of a Rwandan-led army that crossed into the Zaire ( now the Democratic Republic of the Congo ) to defeat the ex-FAR and Interahamwe, Hutu militia groups that had committed the Rwandan genocide and were engaged in cross-border attacks on Rwanda.

The new Rwandan government, dominated by the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front ( RPF ), wished to identify those individuals and Interahamwe militia members in the camps who had committed genocide.

This agreement outlined the disarmament of the former Rwandan Armed Forces ( Ex-FAR ) and the Interahamwe militia on the one hand, and the withdrawal of Rwandan forces from the Democratic Republic of Congo ( DRC ) on the other.

Currently the Ugandans and the MLC still hold a wide section of the north of the country ; Rwandan forces and its front, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie ( RCD ) control a large section of the east ; and government forces or their allies hold the west and south of the country.

In October 2002, the new president was successful in getting occupying Rwandan forces to withdraw from eastern Congo ; two months later, an agreement was signed by all remaining warring parties to end the fighting and set up a Transition Government, the make-up of which would allow representation for all negotiating parties.

* 1994 – Rwandan Genocide: Military advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General and head of the Military Division of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations of the United Nations Maurice Baril recommends that the UN multi-national forces in Zaire stand down.

In addition, humanitarian intervention by multinational forces became more frequent and the media began to play a big role, particularly in the lead up to the 1999 NATO mission in Yugoslavia, while by contrast, the 1994 Rwandan Genocide had little attention.

Many exiled refugee Rwandan Tutsis in Uganda had joined the rebel forces of Yoweri Museveni in the Ugandan Bush War and had then become part of the Ugandan military upon the rebel victory in 1986.

In addition to Rwandan forces, Laurent Kabila's AFDL ( Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo ) forces were also supported by Ugandan forces, with whom Kagame had trained in the late 1980s, which then invaded Eastern Zaire from the northeast.

With Kabila's success in the Congo, he no longer desired an alliance with the Tutsi-RPF Rwandan army and the Ugandan forces, and in August 1998 ordered both the Ugandans and Tutsi-Rwandan army out of the DRC.

However, neither Kagame's Rwandan Tutsi forces nor Museveni's Ugandan forces had any intention of leaving the Congo, and the framework of the Second Congo War was laid.

Ugandan and Rwandan forces within Congo began to battle each other for territory, and Congolese Mai Mai militias, most active in the South and North Kivu provinces ( in which most refugees were located ) took advantage of the conflict to settle local scores and widen the conflict, battling each other, Ugandan and Rwandan forces, and even Congolese forces.

From eastern Zaire, the rebels and foreign government forces under the leadership of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Rwandan Minister of Defense Paul Kagame launched an offensive to overthrow Mobutu, joining forces with locals opposed to him as they marched west toward Kinshasa.

In 2002, child soldiers were used by Rwandan government forces and paramilitaries, operating within the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The ambiguous political and social position of the Banyamulenge has been a point of contention in the province, in the wake of incursion by fleeing Interahamwe forces responsible for the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis into the Kivu region after the liberation of neighboring Rwanda by the Tutsi-led RPF, leading to the Banyamulenge playing a key role in the run-up to the First Congo War in 1996-7 and Second Congo War of 1998-2003.